This project investigates how digital skills develop in the absence of traditional family support structures and aims to identify any critical and overlooked gaps that emerge.
Mapping the digital lives of care-experienced children
A new Oxford Internet Institute project is inviting local authorities and organisations supporting care-experienced young people to help map current policy and practice around digital access, skills and support.
An invitation to help shape new research into how care-experienced young people secure digital access and develop digital skills, as well as the needs and experiences of professional teams supporting them
Being online is no longer optional. Digital technologies are central to the way young people learn, build relationships, find support and prepare for adulthood. Homework platforms, online banking, housing applications, job searches, benefits systems and health services all assume that young people have the confidence, access and support needed to navigate the digital world.
For children in care and care leavers, securing support and negotiating digital access can look very different compared to young people growing up without the experience of care. Placement moves, inconsistent Wi-Fi or device access, safeguarding restrictions, school filtering, limited data, changing adult relationships and unequal opportunities for informal digital coaching can all shape what young people are able to do online. Professionals and carers often have to make difficult judgements: how to keep young people safe without narrowing the opportunities they need to build independence, confidence and digital capital?
The Digital Lives of Care-experienced Children is a new two-year research project based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The project explores how care-experienced children and young adults develop essential digital skills in the absence of long-term, stable family support, and what this means for policy, practice and preparation for adulthood. Our aim is practical as well as academic: to build an evidence base that can support local authorities, schools, carers, advocates and organisations working with care-experienced young people.
Our first step is a scoping exercise to understand how digital access and digital skills for care-experienced children and care leavers are currently being approached across local and national systems.
Social care professionals are rarely heard from in this context. As a result, the challenges they face supporting the digital lives of young people in their care may remain less visible and potentially under-supported.
We are keen to hear from professionals working in children’s social care, leaving care, virtual schools, fostering and residential services, education, digital inclusion or access teams, IT and transformation teams, and organisations that support care-experienced young people and care leavers.
This scoping exercise is an opportunity to build a clearer picture of what is already happening, where responsibilities sit, what promising practice is emerging, and where professionals feel the biggest gaps remain.
At this stage, participation would be light-touch and flexible. It might involve a short conversation with the research team, sharing relevant public or relevant policy documents, signposting colleagues who work on digital inclusion or care-experienced young people’s transitions to adulthood, or helping us understand how different local roles connect and what training is provided to staff supporting these young people.
Digital inclusion is now inseparable from corporate parenting responsibilities, education, transitions to adulthood and access to opportunity. Care-experienced young people need more than devices: they need reliable access, trusted guidance from skilled professionals/ carers, confidence, safe opportunities to practise, and systems that recognise digital life as part of everyday life.
By contributing to the scoping exercise, local authorities and sector organisations can help shape a national evidence base and ensure that future outputs reflect the realities of practice. Participating organisations will also have opportunities to learn from emerging findings and feed into practical, policy-facing resources designed to support work with care-experienced children and young adults.
If you work in this space, or if your organisation supports care-experienced young people and care leavers, we would be delighted to hear from you. We are especially interested in speaking with people who can help us understand current local or national policy, practice, challenges and examples of promising work.
To register interest in taking part in the initial scoping exercise, please contact the research team digital.lives.care@oii.ox.ac.uk
Find out more about the project: The Digital Lives of Care-experienced Children
This project investigates how digital skills develop in the absence of traditional family support structures and aims to identify any critical and overlooked gaps that emerge.